Orca is written in Python and the GSettings support for GSettings (via PyGI) is not ready

We need those changes available for Guadalinex v7 and Guadalinfo v6 distributions which ship a GNOME version with no GSettings support at all. Backporting Glib for getting that support doesn’t seem to be a good and healthy choice…

That’s why, after some discussions we all agreed to create a settings manager that could be plugged by different config backends (plain texts, old Python based config, GConf, GSettings, KDE settings?, etc). It is not much more work and it would make happier everyone

The settings manager itself is almost ready and now it is working properly with the old Python based config files. The next step is to get the GConf backend ready to go. Later, when the GSettings support in Python is ready, we’ll create that backend based on the GConf one (it should be easy).

For the GConf backend we are focusing first on defining the schema, because there are a lot of different keys and values to care about and they need to be checked and confirmed. My friend Javi is working on that and he has asked for help to check for missing keys, values or deprecated ones. Any help here will be very useful.

Once he has the GConf schema, he’ll be able to create the backend which will get and set the different keys and values into GConf system.

I know that all this settings manager sounds a bit overcomplicated but the implementation won’t be and we need it, at least for the transition. Hopefully we’ll skip this manager and we’ll let just the GSettings connection at the next cycle.

The discussions were very interesting and explained better than me the needs that made us to take this approach so, I recommend reading them if you’re interesting on this topic.

NOTE:This post is not mine, the post have been originally writen by my friend and colleague Félix Ontañón (aka fontanon) which is far more complete than the one I could write, so he let me translate and publish his original one here.

My apologies for any mistake on the translation process. If there are any, they are for sure mine, not his. Well, actually my friend Rober (aka “the guy who fix my bad English” ) was fixing some mistakes already

Our objective was clear: to open ways of collaboration with the Gnome Foundation and present our intentions to develop projects, in terms of accessibility for the Gnome desktop. The Consorcio Fernando de los Rios is currently bidding in Andalusia: Improvements, bugfixes and to imitate the JAWS’s behaviors on Orca; image acquisition, improved recognition and export formats on OCRFeeder and reading the text with Orca from PDFs on Evince .

In the event was also present Dani Baeyens from Warp, who will also work in Gnome accessibility projects under the contract of Fernando de los Rios Consortium, improving Caribou (Gok replacement) and functional integrity of predictive text, Presage .

When we arrived at the event, the table of participants were discussing concrete actions on the initiative of Ambassadors Gnome, but we soon could start to present the developments that we, Yaco and Emergya, were involved. In a round shift Lorenzo, Juanje and I told the massive use of Gnome is promoted from the local government in various ICT initiatives: Guadalinex , Education , Guadalinfo and the the Network of Libraries , which justifies a special effort to promote and address the problems of assistive technologies and public services are fully accessible to all citizens.

Speaking about Guadalinfo, we presented the project as a true laboratory of accessibility, because apart from software improvements, a big purchase of assistance devices for visual, cognitive and motor disabilities is being done. Stormy Peters at this time we said if we had any picture, I remembered that Pedro Marín, from the Guadalinfo center of “Peligros” (Granada) had shared on Facebook a few and these were projected in the room:

Attendees were surprised by the examples of use of assistive technology devices with the Gnome accesibility assistances and asked us to hang material on the Gnome 3.0 website: photos or videos of real people using Gnome and devices in the Guadalinfo centers. We had a first task.

At lunch time, we dived into the issue with Vincent Untz and Licio Fonseca who advised us on ways of collaborating with the community to gain acceptance of our developments.

In the afternoon Paul and Stormy sat down with us to see what we could do –the companies- for Gnome and viceversa. We insisted on that the local government has a real interest in supporting accessibility projects, for its projects and that these developments, are given back to the community. If we get visibility and acknowledgement for these initiatives in the community, we are sure more projects will come. We trust in Gnome as a Government-friendly community and that’s how they want to be received aswell. Paul asked us to work directly with the developers of the applications through the traditional communication ways that are usually used in the community: mailing list, irc, etc..